Users generate and access a large number of articles, such as emails, web pages, word processing documents, spreadsheet documents, instant messenger messages, and presentation documents, using a client device, such as a personal computer, personal digital assistant, or mobile phone. Some articles are stored on one or more storage devices coupled to, accessible by, or associated with the client device. Users sometimes wish to search the storage device for articles.
Conventional client-device search applications may significantly degrade the performance of the client device. For example, certain conventional client-device search applications typically use batch processing to index all articles, which can result in noticeably slower performance of the client device during the batch processing. Additionally, batch processing occurs only periodically. Therefore, when a user performs a search, the most recent articles are sometimes not included in the results. Moreover, if the batch processing is scheduled for a time when the client device is not operational and is thus not performed for an extended period of time, the index of articles associated with the client device can become outdated. Conventional client-device search applications can also need to rebuild the index at each batch processing or build new partial indexes and perform a merge operation that can use a lot of client-device resources. Conventional client-device search applications also sometimes use a great deal of memory when operational, resulting in slower performance of the client device.
Furthermore, conventional client-device search applications may perform indexing of articles such as documents and email messages by forming a separate entity for each article. Thus, when a search is initiated, the search engine may have to check each entity for a match, resulting in a time consuming, inefficient search. Conventional client-device search applications also may not distinguish between a user's interaction with articles happening in real time and occurring in the past. Additionally, conventional client-device search applications can require an explicit search query from a user to generate results, and may be limited to file names or the contents of a particular application's files.